Museum on Wheels: A Moving Experience : Bowers Exhibits Visit Students

The buffalo dance mask from Africa was a show stopper, especially for the boys.

“You could put it on and play with it and scare people,” said Carlos Quezada, 9, as he studied the elaborately carved African mask.

“When I grow up, I’d like to work on sculpture like this,” he said.

After touring part of Bowers Museum this week, other children from John Adams Elementary School in Santa Ana also said they would like to be artists. Museum officials said that kind of artistic seed-planting is among the benefits of letting children immerse themselves in cultural experiences.

Museum Is Mobile Again

And best of all, said school Principal Marti Baker, the children didn’t have to go to the museum. It came to them.

The mobile museum, with the city’s financial help, is again visiting schools, said Joan Primm, curator of education for Bowers Museum. The program started in 1977 with federal money through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act. But when that funding ended in 1980, so did the traveling museum.

The program “started back up again last November, and we’re getting a very good response from the schools in Santa Ana,” Primm said. “Already, about 10,000 students have seen the exhibits.”

Class after class filed into the van parked this week, in front of the school at 2130 S. Raitt St. The first reaction was a hushed awe.

“It looks very much like a real museum on the inside,” Primm said. Overhead track lights, carpeted floors and surrealistic-white walls gave the van an avant-garde aura. Students seemed to sense the richness of the collected artifacts around them as they entered.

Define, React, Decide

Each display was designed to make a student think. Printed messages at child’s eye level stressed three goals: define, react, and decide. “These are the way people involve themselves in art,” Primm said.

First, the art is defined for the students. Then the messages ask them to think about the materials, the craftsmanship and so forth. Finally, students are asked to consider feelings about each exhibit, what they like or dislike.

Fourth-grader Shawnell Bradley, 10, stared long and lovingly at the framed art. “I like the Orange County art,” she said, noting that many of the paintings and drawings were by local artists. She also admired some hard-carved furniture. “I definitely want to be an artist, a drawing artist, when I grow up,” she said.

Each school pays a flat fee of $50 for a day’s visit by the mobile museum. “We wish we didn’t have to charge anything, but the fee is necessary,” Primm said. The $10,000 annual grant from the City of Santa Ana doesn’t completely cover the exhibit costs.

Field Trip Unused

Principal Baker said the $50 fee is a bargain. “Since we only have one field-trip day a year, the children usually like to go to some place like the zoo or the beach,” Baker said. “This allows us to have a museum visit without using up our field day.”

The Bowers staff plans to take the mobile museum to every school in Santa Ana. In February and March, the exhibit will tour schools in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa. “After that, we’ll go to schools in Placentia and Yorba Linda,” Primm said.

Students who see the traveling show are encouraged to come to the bigger displays in the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana. “This is what museums are all about,” she said. “It’s educating and reaching out to the public with new information.”